Paul and Lucy Spadoni periodically live in Tuscany to explore Paul’s Italian roots, practice their Italian and enjoy “la dolce vita.”
All work is copyrighted and may not be reprinted without written permission from the author, who can be contacted at www.paulspadoni.com

Italian girls and boys receive lots of practice in interpersonal relationships during the Italian passeggiata, one reason they may be more skilled socially than American young people.

I’m reading a fascinating book,
Amore, by cultural sociologist Roger Friedland, who is
imminently more qualified than I to speak on the topic. Friedland
studies and teaches on love, sex and God, and he has worked in
universities in both the United States and Rome, Italy. During his
seminar classes, students in both countries freely shared their
encounters with members of the opposite sex. Friedland also brought
his wife and two coming-of-age daughters with him to Italy, giving
him additional first-hand accounts and insights.

He observed that young women frequently
walked alone at night in Rome’s city center, waiting near midnight
for the last buses home. Were they harassed or afraid, he asked the
women in his class. They told him that boys routinely made unwanted
remarks, came too close and sometimes touched them where they didn’t
want to be touched. However, the women were not afraid.

Friedland discovered that American and
Italian women were equally likely to endure harassment. “But,” he
continued, “there is a difference, a big one: American men are much
more likely to commit rape. One-quarter of female college students in
America will experience either rape or attempted rape. Twelve percent
of high school girls have already been raped. The real numbers are
likely much higher, because many women not only don’t tell the
police; they don’t tell anyone.”

Friedland’s Italian students were
stunned to hear these statistics. Fewer than 5 percent of Italian
women between the ages of 16 and 24 have ever experienced rape or
attempted rape. Most of that—about 70 percent—was committed by
their intimate partner.

“The question is, why?” Friedland
asks. “It’s not because Roman men don’t look. They are
voracious with their eyes, savoring the bodies of women as they pass.
After all the time I’ve spent in Rome, I’ve come to think that
part of the reason rape is so much rarer in Italy is that Italian men
love women more than American men do. Beneath all the sexual jest,
the lusty looks and suggestive remarks, Roman men respect women.”

Friedland’s daughters were subjected
to this harassment as they entered their teen years, but they learned
to cope along with the Italian girls. He said that Italians accept
that flirting is part of human nature but is not a precursor to rape.
Girls in Italy are free to “swear at the boys, to berate them, hit
them on the heads or in the face, belittling them for their pathetic
antics.” His girls didn’t regard the advances as dangerous.

“Roman women who grow up in the
system learn to maneuver, to parry and resist the verbal and visual
predations of men, because they feel relatively safe from violation,”
he writes. “Roman girls learn early not to be afraid of boys. They
grow accustomed to walking alone to the square to fetch olive oil or
pizza bianca for their mothers.”

Friedland also contrasts Americans and
Italians in their beliefs about marriage. The American students he
surveyed while teaching at UC Santa Barbara wondered whether love is
real; they seemed afraid to believe in love and lifelong marriage
because they had witnessed so much disappointment in their parents’
relationships. Only about 60 percent of the UC students said they
wanted to marry and stay with one person all their lives, and less
than half said they actually expected to.

And why should they? Of American
couples who married in the first five years of the 1990s, 42 percent
divorced within 15 years. By contrast, only 8 percent of comparable
Italian couples had separated. In the United States, close to half of
all marriages are remarriages. In Italy, 95 percent of all marriages
are first-time ventures for both parties.

Friedland also found that Italians
are—to put it delicately—better lovers. To put it less
delicately, he said that “young Italians—especially females, but
also males—have more frequent orgasms than young Americans. Love
makes for pleasure. Love radically increases the probability that a
woman will have an orgasm. Italians still revere passion. Because the
men love the women, they are more likely to care about giving them
pleasure. And the women they love take pleasure from that love. Men’s
love works.”

Again, the question must be asked, why
this difference? Friedland goes to great length to answer this, and
for a more complete explanation, you’ll need to read his book. But the
heart of the answer has to do with how Italians experience family and
family life. Italian families are all-absorbing, involving
grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.

“Roman kids are deeply invested in
their families—forever,” he said. “Unlike middle-class American
kids, who leave for college and return home just to rest and refuel,
most young Italians continue to live at home while attending
university. When Roman kids do move out, it’s to get married and
set up their own households. That often happens nearby, even in the
very same building their parents live in, frequently with their
parents help. And overwhelmingly, they rely on their parents to care
for their children when they can’t be there.”

I don’t mean to make it sound like
Italian family life and male-female relationships are some kind of
paradise. We’ve seen husbands and wives yelling at each other on
the streets, families arguing loudly in houses as we pass by, and we
read headlines in the Italian newspapers about murder and abuse.
We’ve been warned that certain parts of large cities are unsafe to
walk in at night. But to fear, as I once did, that Italy may be more
dangerous for my daughters than the United States is
nonsense—unless I was worried that they might fall in love and have stable marriages.

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First off, before you hassle me about our title, Lucy thought of it. Yes, I know some people may think broad is derogatory, but the etymology is uncertain and she doesn’t find it offensive, and it made me laugh. We have been married since 1974 and are empty-nesters now, which allows me to bring my submerged Italophilia into the open. We first came to live in Italy from February-April in 2011 and have returned during the same months every year. From 2011-2015, we lived in San Salvatore, at the foot of the hilltop city Montecarlo, where my paternal grandparents were born, raised and, in 1908, married. In late 2015, we bought a home in Montecarlo. We come for a variety of purposes: We want to re-establish contact with distant cousins in both Nonno’s and Nonna’s families, we want to learn the language and see what it is like to live as Italians in modern Italy, we like to travel and experience different cultures. Even if we aren’t successful at achieving these purposes, we love Italy and enjoy every moment here, so there is no chance we will be disappointed. I am grateful to God for giving me a wife who is beautiful, clever, adaptable and willing to jump into my dreams wholeheartedly.